Today’s Eponymy in August is the Overton Window.
Joseph P. Overton was the vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Michigan. In the 1990s he observed that, on the topic of school choice (still a contentious topic today!), one could order all of the possible policies by how free or how restrictive they were. Somewhere in the center of it there would be a continuous grouping of policies — what Overton called, “a window of political possibility” — that would be considered politically acceptable in the current political climate.
This window did not represent what the politicians themselves thought were the best policies. Rather, what dictated the boundaries of the window was what the politicians believed that they could vote for or champion and still win reelection later on. Ideas outside the window are thought of by the voting public as radical or unthinkable. In the case of school choice, an extreme view at one end of the spectrum is only public schools, no homeschooling, charter schools, or private schools; at the other end would be no public schools but all types of home and private schooling allowed. No two-sigma voter (someone within the middle 95% of the average political view) would vote in a candidate championing such things, so they’re not considered in legislature.
To change the Overton window, then, requires an appeal to the public rather than to the lawmakers. The Mackinac Center touts that this is a function of think tanks, rather self-servingly. Regardless, a change in the political tradewinds, that is noticed by pundits and analysts, will move the window and change what lawmakers will accept as potential policy.